Honey is a very tasty and healthy natural product. Unfortunately, the modern market is overflowing with fakes, sometimes so skillfully made that even experienced experts are confused when trying to distinguish them from the original.
Instructions
Step 1
To reduce the likelihood of buying a low-quality product, make it a rule to buy honey only in trusted places. It is absolutely not profitable for a familiar beekeeper, with whom you will meet more than once, to sell you a honey surrogate, but brisk comrades who carry honey already poured into jars to apartments should be feared. They can demonstrate the quality of the product being sold, but the honey there will be forcibly a couple of centimeters from the top of the jar, while the main content may turn out to be fake. Therefore, when buying honey from strangers, take only a draft product.
Step 2
Fresh honey that has recently been pumped out of the combs should be runny and translucent. Only buckwheat honey is dark, but often under its guise they sell the overheated last year's product, in which there are no longer any useful properties. Liquid honey should be wrapped around a spoon, and falling back into the jar, forms a characteristic honey slide on the surface.
Step 3
In October-November, natural fresh honey begins to crystallize, forming a homogeneous mass without stratification. If you are offered liquid honey in winter, it is either warmed up at high temperatures, or it comes from sugar-fed bees. It is not worth taking such honey.
Step 4
It is customary on the market to test honey using a chemical pencil, which is rare today. If the pencil leaves a blue color on the surface of the honey, it means that it reacts with starch, that is, the beekeeping product being tested is a fake. There is another way to determine the presence of starch. Dissolve a spoonful of honey in a glass of water and, when the suspension settles, add a couple of drops of iodine to the glass. Starch will betray itself with a treacherous blue discoloration.
Step 5
If you suspect that you have been sold honey diluted with sugar syrup, dip a slice of bread in it for 10 minutes. Bread taken out of natural honey will remain firm, while those who have been in sugar syrup will creep into porridge.
